


a thousand rainy days since we first met

by SafelyCapricious



Series: i put a spell on you [2]
Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Magic, F/M, Magical Tattoos
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-03
Updated: 2015-04-03
Packaged: 2018-03-20 19:37:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,721
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3662427
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SafelyCapricious/pseuds/SafelyCapricious
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The first time Grant sees Jemma, she steals the cereal he’s reaching for – the last box of Count Chocula on the shelf – shouting something about a hunter over her shoulder as she vanishes around the corner of the aisle. </p><p>The Modern-Magic AU</p>
            </blockquote>





	a thousand rainy days since we first met

**Author's Note:**

> This is, kind of, for the prompt "I've decided to make you my new project" from JD.

The first time Grant sees Jemma, she steals the cereal he’s reaching for – the last box of Count Chocula on the shelf – shouting something about a hunter over her shoulder as she vanishes around the corner of the aisle.

He stands there, stunned, hand still outstretched for a long moment before it drops to his side. By the time he’s stalked to the front of the store, she’s vanished.

 Not since he’d gained his majority and wrestled control of the family from Christian had someone been so…caviler about his existence. Hell, it’s been nearly that long since someone was willing to stay in the same aisle as him in the store at all.

It’s almost a relief when the cashier flinches and drops her gaze, muttering her niceties into her sweatshirt.

He knows his irritation is boiling off of him in waves, it’s a miracle she doesn’t bolt.

 It takes him two weeks to track her down. And only then because he has spells to work on and he refuses to prioritize her above them.

She’s new to town. Which makes sense. She probably didn’t even know who he was.

 She surely does now.

He does his best to forget her – there’s no reason to remember one little mage who had the gall to steal his cereal. Not when she didn’t know better. (He considers, for a moment, making an example of her. It is _very_ tempting. Only the stray thought that it’s exactly what Christian would do, stops him.)

He forgets about her. Mostly.

The second time he sees her, he’s drinking coffee at one of the largest tables in the crowded café when she comes in. (He takes delight in how quickly the previous occupants had pretended to get phone calls, nervously transferring drinks into to-go cups, some simply abandoning their beverage, before rushing out.)

It’s her laugh that he recognizes. He keeps his personal protections too tight to taste anyone – though he keeps close watch on the power levels of those around him. She barely registers for him, when it comes to power. The man who enters with her, he has more, but still not enough to be a threat.

But he’s curious. He lowers his outermost shields and probes, tasting her magic on his tongue. It’s sharper than he was expecting, almost spicy. He rolls it around his tongue, able to separate out the components after only a moment – fresh bread and allspice, cinnamon sharp enough to make his nose twitch and, yes, cloves. She must work well with potions.

When he opens his eyes she’s standing on the other side of the table from him, frowning fiercely. “ _That_ was rude,” she says. He can hear a faint waver in her voice, see that her hands are trembling slightly despite the fists she has them clenched into.

He tilts his head to the side, more surprised than he’s been in a long while. She’s frightened, he can see that in every line of her body – but she’s still got her chin set and her teeth bared and she’s trying to stare him down.

The man she came in with has his face in his hands, muttering softly enough that Grant can’t hear him. The rest of the café is motionless, staring at her with wide eyes.

“Was it?” he asks, conversationally, after far too long a pause, and takes a sip of his coffee. It’s lukewarm and he lets his dragon slide to his fingertips to breathe flame across the top of the mug. It’s needlessly showy.

Her gaze flickers down before she resolutely meets his eyes again. Her jaw tightens and he watches her heart beat flutter in the hallow of her throat. Still, her voice is strong when she says, “You know it was.” He does know that, everyone knows that. He was not expecting to be called on it. She is…not what he was expecting.

He can practically feel everyone else hold their breath. He grins, nice and slow, and asks, “Should I have asked, first?”

She gives a jerky nod, but instead of retreating – despite the fact that the man she came in with now has a grip on her elbow, she stands firm. “Yes. You should’ve asked first and you should apologize now,” she shakes off the grip on her arm and crosses her arms.

His grin gets sharper. The barista is inching back further behind the counter. He takes another sip of his coffee and asks, “Would you have given me permission?”

She sputters, and he watches in amazement as the tremble in her hands disappears as color rises to her face. “No! I don’t even know you!”

He laughs before standing and giving her a sharp, mocking, bow. “Grant Ward.”

She shifts her weight and shrugs, carelessly. He wonders how she knows that he doesn’t plan to hurt her. No one else seems to have realized, or are willing to believe. But her fear is gone; it’s been gone since before he laughed. And he’s _only_ just come to the realization that he doesn’t want to make an example of her.

She turns away from him, saying over her shoulder, “I’ll tell you my name when you apologize.”

His dragon skitters up to his neck to peer out at her, breathing flame across his jaw as he sits down again. Now is not the time to tell her he already knows who she is – already knows who the man with her is too. He knows all about the people who have moved in and taken over Melinda and Phil’s Magic Shop.

She orders a muffin, the man with her, a coffee. They have a short, sharp conversation before leaving. She very pointedly doesn’t look at him again, though he keeps his gaze on her the entire time.

He’s intrigued, after that.

The third through fifteenth times he sees her, he searches her out to kill time.

She asks him, sharply, the tenth time he’s shown up as she and her partner ward a house, “What are you even doing here?”

He’s never seen the potion she’s using, thin purple smoke a haze above the cauldron. Even though it’s still on the fire – still obviously boiling – she sticks her arm in fearlessly and flicks the liquid at the sigil Leopold has drawn with some other potion on the cornerstone of the house. It tastes like honey, thick and slow on his tongue, and he gets distracted from the question trying to puzzle out what, exactly, she’s made.

She shoots him a sharp look and he smirks, pretending he wasn’t answering just to irritate her – his answer follows the same theory as he says, glibly, "I've decided to make you my new project."

Her spine stiffens and she scowls at him. He steps back before the sprinkle of liquid that she flicks towards him can connect – it tastes like burnt sugar where it lands in the grass at his feet.

He salutes, ever mockingly, and leaves.

The sixteenth through thirty-ninth times he sees her are because he starts to specifically schedule time to see her, using locator spells to find her. Her companions remain wary of him still – no doubt frightened by the stories (most of them true enough) that always circulate about him. But Jemma…Jemma is only annoyed.

(He likes it, likes to watch the angry flush rise to her cheeks, likes to watch her struggle to ignore him as he purposefully brushes his power against hers.)

She is unexpectedly delightful, and he wants her.

The only thing he’s ever wanted is power. She’s not power – she’s skilled, certainly, but he can duplicate her results if he has to, more forcibly and without even a quarter of finesse, but he doesn’t want her because of her power.

He just…wants her.

It’s a novel experience.

The thirtieth time he sees her is the first time he tries to touch her.

She’s barely started to be something other than annoyed, when he tries to touch her. He knows he should wait, but he’s fascinated and he finds himself moving before he’s conscious of the decision to do so.

She’s leaning over a potion, completely involved, and he reaches out to brush the hair off the back of her neck where it’s sticking. He doesn’t get within an inch of her flesh before her wards flash out and singe his fingers.

He pulls his hand back, hissing.

She doesn’t so much as twitch, doesn’t look up.

Leopold chooses that moment to come back into the room, frowning and twitching at the sight of him. Jemma smiles up at the other man and Grant has to fight down a snarl, annoyance brought closer to the surface due to the pain in his fingertips.

He could break through her barrier, easily. It’s well constructed and it’s strong, but his power could puncture holes into it in an instant.

He doesn’t want to.

He wants her to _want_ it.

He wants her _trust._

That’s also a novel experience.

He retreats with a slight bow, hands hidden so she can’t see that he’s hurt, without saying anything further.

His fingers tingle and spark purple for three days.

It’s also more difficult than he ever could have imagined.

The desire isn’t gentle, it’s flames licking at his heels, constant pressure in the back of his mind.

When he’s not with her, he wants to be. He sees flowers and considers how she could respond to the gift of them. (The answers is, nearly always, that she will refuse to take them from him, and then if he leaves them behind she’ll only take them if she has use for them in her potions.)

It doesn’t occur to him that trust must go both ways, not until the fortieth time he sees her, not until his dragon is splintering into a thousand fragments and offering itself up for her approval that he realizes.

 He’s still reeling from the pain of her cutting off his connection to his dragon. It only lasts a second, but he hadn’t even consciously sent the dragon to see what it could find behind her barriers. But as soon as he had expressed how easy it would be for someone to slip something there, he’d felt it dart away. It had found something. A small, dark, foul tasting ball of magic.

 And now he’s staring at his dragon, infinitesimally smaller than it was moments before, licking at Jemma’s fingertips.

Her hands are small in his, delicate.

She’s cradling his magic in her hands, he can feel it down to his toes.

He could order the rest of the dragon back to him – force it to obey.

He doesn’t want it to. He wants her to have it. It will keep her safe when he’s not there to protect her. It will make sure that there are no more small dark balls of hate hiding behind Jemma’s barriers.

He’s terrified she’ll reject it, reject him.

She accepts it. And for one blissful second he feels wrapped in her magic, before it breaks away and anchors into her. The tether to him is still there, however, it will remain for days, but he’s not getting feedback anymore, only feeding it his power.

She could destroy him. His life is literally in her hands.

Oh, she didn’t know it yet. She hadn’t asked the right questions, despite the truth geas.

She will look up magical tattoos as soon as she gets back to her shop, he knows her too well to think she won’t.

 He’s equally certain that she, like every other young mage, did look into them when she was younger. But when you’re creating your own it requires a massive amount of power expenditure all at once – more than she is capable of creating without sacrificing a life.

She’ll look up the giving of magical tattoos, this time. She’ll know what he’s done. His trust in her will bleed through every word she reads.

 He wonders what she’ll think when she finally reads that she could pull every last ounce of him out, through the cat on her skin. She could take all of his power and leave him a husk.

And yet…He isn’t afraid.

He’s still shaking, regardless, when he salutes her and retreats. He can feel the kitten pulling at his energy, he gives it up freely.

She finds him, the forty-first time he sees her.

He can taste her magic before she appears, and he smiles down at the book he’s reading for a moment before closing it and schooling his features. The path up to the house is long, and he enjoys watching her stalk down it from his place on his wooden porch swing.

His dragon races for a moment, wings flapping frantically, under his shirt, before curling up on his arm to get the best view of Jemma. He tries to feel annoyance at the antics, but he can’t.

He looks her over, once she gets close enough, and notices that she looks tired – to be expected, he hadn’t been lying about her new tattoo needing her to feed it energy – but good. Healthy. There’s a glow to her skin even if there are bags under her eyes.

 She’s also scowling.

 He smiles, despite his efforts not to. She’s like an angry kitten when she’s mad, all puffed up and indignant. (The fact that the tattoo chose to be exactly that is just the icing on the cake, as far as he’s concerned.)

 “I could barely get out of bed for the past week, Ward. You said I’d be tired for a _few_ days!” her voice is raw, like she’s been coughing – or screaming. He’s standing in front of her before he’s made the conscious decision to move, taking the eight feet at speed with ease.

 He ignores her flinch and looks for any signs of magical malady, tasting the edge of her magic with his – still refusing to ask permission for doing it. It should’ve been four days, max, of extreme tiredness for her. Maybe less. He’d been feeding a lot of his own power along the tether to the kitten, it shouldn’t have needed much from her. Maybe he did it wrong?

 He tilts his head, resists the urge to touch her and find what he’s looking for, and asks, “Can I see your tattoo?”

 She only hesitates for a moment before pulling her sleeve up to show him the kitten, curled up in a ball and vibrating slightly with purrs on her forearm.

 It’s much larger than it was the last time he saw it – much larger than it should be yet.

 His fingers hover over it, and after a moment the kitten is up and stretching, arching into his touch – it’s a relief to see she’s not yet grown enough to peel herself away from Jemma’s skin.

This _is_ his fault.

But it’s good, too. He forced her tattoo to grow quicker than it would on it’s own, it can hold a bigger power reservoir now – he can feel his own power simmering under the surface of the fur, even though the tether between him and that tattoo is barely there anymore.

(He very pointedly doesn’t think about the harm he could’ve done, if he forced the tattoo to need more of Jemma than she was capable of giving it. He didn’t do that. Jemma is fine.)

He shrugs and takes a step back, reassured that nothing else is wrong with her, and says, “I did say you’d be very, very tired.”

She narrows her eyes at him, he gives her a flash of a smile in return, before climbing back up his porch and retrieving his book.

She stays there, hands on her hips, for another moment before mumbling, “Should’ve drained you dry when I had the chance,” and turning on her heel and leaving.

He sends a pulse of energy down the thread that hasn’t yet broken between him and the tattoo, watches the energy hit her and her gait get smoother. Despite the risk, he’ll miss being able to send her his energy, once it snaps.

He grins down at his book.

Of course, there are other ways to form more permanent tethers, ones that aren’t quite so dangerous.

**Author's Note:**

> My writing tumblr can be found [here](http://capriciouswrites.tumblr.com/)! Come say hi and give me a prompt.
> 
> I hope you enjoy!


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